How Alien burst forth, bloomed and mutated

December 5, 2009 — 11.00am

The other week I went to see a science-fiction thriller called Pandorum which opens with a scene in which a befuddled Dennis Quaid falls out of a space-pod dressed only in his underpants. The film that follows amounts to a prolonged bout of paranoid hysterics. People scream, run about and get eaten. There is a dark and rusting spaceship, a gaggle of barely glimpsed monsters and a sexy, confident warrior woman who puts her bungling male counterparts to shame. It is, if you appreciate this sort of thing, a perfectly serviceable film.

But Pandorum (due to open in Australia in March) gives us something else. Every scene - every frame - carries the whiff of deja vu; a sense that there is a better movie nestled deep inside, waiting to burst forth. Afterwards it strikes me what that movie is and I reel out of the cinema like a suitor at the end of a misbegotten date. The only reason I like Pandorum is because I am still in love with Alien.

It is 30 years since Ridley Scott's picture was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. Since then, its influence has bloomed and mutated. Alien was the film that set the visual template (grungy and industrial) for any director keen to shoot a picture about monsters in outer space. It was the film that contained a grisly, chest-bursting centrepiece that tapped into the fears of the age. Yet ultimately it all comes back to the character Ellen Ripley. In the figure of the resolute Sigourney Weaver, Alien may just be the film that overhauled the old, unreconstructed horror genre and dared to put a woman centre-stage.

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Make no mistake: a horror movie is what Alien is. ''It's basically a haunted house film,'' explains David Thomson, a film critic and author. ''The only difference is that the old dark house just happens to be a spaceship.'' Thomson has examined the film and its three sequels in his book The Alien Quartet and feels that this quality is what separates Scott's outing from the ones that followed. ''It is a very slow-building film that gives the sense of some great unnamed terror to come. That's a quality that has much more to do with horror than it does with science fiction.''

This gave rise to Scott's joke that nothing actually happens for the first 45 minutes. In its opening sections, Alien rattles around a space freighter (the Nostromo) and introduces us to its bickering crew (John Hurt and Ian Holm among them).

Then boom! The film bursts into hideous life with one of cinema's most notorious setpieces. Hurt's character, impregnated by an extraterrestrial, abruptly goes into labour at the breakfast table. His chest explodes and the beast is loosed.

Watching the scene now, you find yourself drawn as much to the reactions of the actors as to the creature itself. Scott famously shot the film in one take with four cameras and kept the actors in the dark as to what, exactly, they were about to witness. It is safe to assume that none of them was as startled as Veronica Cartwright (playing the navigator), who is shown recoiling in genuine horror from a spray of blood. ''What you saw on camera was the real response,'' recalls co-star Tom Skerritt. ''She had no idea what the hell happened. All of a sudden this thing just came up.''

Cartwright's shock would be mirrored in cinemas around the world. ''Everybody remembers the moment when the creature comes out, because it was such a staggering event; totally beyond prediction,'' says Thomson. ''I remember seeing the film at the time with my wife and she was so horrified that she stood up and walked right out of the theatre.''

In Scott's film, the horror came garnished with sexual politics. Take another look at the creature that hatches from Hurt's chest. It was designed by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who borrowed freely from the images in Francis Bacon's 1944 painting Three Studies For Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which in turn took its lead from the Greek myth of the Furies. Scott's film was initially pitched as ''Jaws in space'' and Giger's alien features the requisite razor-blade teeth and unreadable, implacable air. Sometimes it is limpid and wet, fashioned on the set out of oysters and clams brought in from a local fishmongers. Sometimes it is hard and blunt. Not to put too fine a point on it, the alien in Alien comes in two guises: vaginal and phallic.

''Alien is a rape movie with male victims,'' explains David McIntee, the author of the Alien study Beautiful Monsters. ''And it also shows the consequences of that rape: the pregnancy and birth. It is a film that plays, very deliberately, with male fears of female reproduction.''

Does this make Alien a conservative film or a radical one? Over the years the debate has been teased out in either direction. In the opinion of the cultural critic Barbara Creed, Scott's film epitomised what she refers to as ''the monstrous feminine''. It trades in classic Freudian imagery (penis-shaped monsters; dark, womb-like interiors) and shudders at the bloody spectacle of childbirth. Here is a horror film made by men that exploits a particularly male fear of all that is female. Others beg to differ. Ripley, they argue, is the game-changer; the character who sends Alien (and its sequels) off in a bold new direction. ''Ripley is pretty revolutionary,'' insists McIntee. ''All of a sudden you have a horror film that has a younger female character who is a survivor and a heroine as opposed to a victim.''

Originally conceived as a male character, Ripley would go on to form the heart and soul of the Alien pictures. As played by Weaver (then 29 and a relative unknown), she initially seems set up to play the conventional role of the sexy scream queen. Except that after a while we realise that not only is she not screaming; she also appears to have no romantic interest. Instead, she tackles tasks with a steely determination. It is Ripley who makes the right decision in refusing to allow the alien aboard the ship, only to be overruled by male colleagues. It is Ripley's misplaced maternal instincts (hurrying off in search of the ship's cat) that enable her to avoid the monster's attack.

James Cameron's sequel Aliens, which came out seven years later, proved even more radical; pushing the subtext to the foreground. ''The series became feminist,'' says Thomson.

Released in 1986, Aliens was as much about Ripley as it was about the aliens. Cameron's film gave her a surrogate daughter to protect, and a new band of swaggering men to lock antlers with. Most intriguing of all, it explored the growing affinity between its heroine and the alien ''queen'' that she battles. ''The thing about Ripley is that she is not especially sympathetic to the human beings in her world,'' says Thomson. ''In the second film you do get the feeling that she and the beast have a kind of understanding. There is a scene … where Ripley threatens to kill off its offspring and the beast backs off. That shows a certain level of kinship. They are both mothers, after all.''

It is the first rule of Hollywood that every good idea must eventually be milked until it dries out. So it was with Alien, which begat (the arguably superior) Aliens and then led to the diminishing returns of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection. ''Actually the third film is underrated,'' McIntee says. ''With those first three movies you have the sense that they are playing, probably unintentionally, with the three classic female archetypes from folklore. Ripley goes from being maiden [in Alien], to mother [Aliens], to crone [Alien 3]. That's where they went wrong with Alien: Resurrection. If there is no fourth archetype, there's nowhere to go.''